About a year ago I wanted to buy a sewing machine, so I went to a store, looked at some sewing equipment, talked to sales people and quickly realized that there are a lot of different sewing machines out there and sales people know very little practical information. Nothing new about it, so I decided to go home and google it and read reviews.
But to my big surprise there was no useful information available. Sure there were some sites and even some reviews, but just two kinds - either reviews at web stores, and they say only great stuff as if anything they sell is outstanding, inexpensive and universally good for anyone. The other kind is user opinions, but they are mostly really useless because they are very limited in any information and judgmental, mostly stupid and often fake.Katya need a project, so we decided to create a site that reviews sewing equipment, and sewreview.com project got started.sewreview.com

More than that, when we began working on it, we thought that building just one review site with all the cool features will be too limiting and we went ahead and built a whole review engine and user sewing equipment of the world review site as a first working model.
It turned out there are two kinds of review sites: one with reviews written by site's staff, and the other with reviews written by user. There is a huge difference between them, but very few people realize that. I studied the subject for a while and it turned out that initially there were only professional reviews, because before the web it was very hard to host user opinions. And those "professional" reviews very often biased because some manufacturers would bribe reviewers and thus they were not fair or honest and as a result people did not really trusted them. Then user opinions came, mostly pioneered by sites like amazon. And they were great, you could read what real users of the products thought.
As a result opinions reviews dominated the web scene. Also it was much easier to create a user opinion site, just selecting a theme, topic, good url and let users do all the work. In the beginning it worked great. But little by little the whole fairness of it broke because marketing and promotional services started to use herds of fake users with hundreds of virtual personalities and armies of them invaded all the forums, polluting them with "users" reviews, that were even worse that sales descriptions because they were very misleading.
And that is where we are now. Very few real review sites and many user's opinion sites filled with fake crap.
It can be fixed, people can create real reviews, and there is a demand for that, but there are many different software modules, products, services and entire sites that let you easily create a user's opinion review site and virtually nothing to create a professional, feature rich real review web site, and that is what we are building. It will be called vedoreview, I will let you know when it is ready for general public.
You can see how an early version works by visiting sewreview.com